Richard Preston

“Nine out of ten humans killed? And you're not bothered." A look of mysterious thoughtfulness crossed his face. "A virus can be…

— Richard Preston

To mess around with Ebola is an easy way to die. Better to work with something safer, such as anthrax.

— Richard Preston

“A good businessman is hard to bruise and quick to heal.”

— Richard Preston

The best way to know what's in the soup, is to boil yourself in it.

— Richard Preston

“He becomes dizzy and utterly weak, and his spine goes limp and nerveless and he loses all sense of balance. The room…

— Richard Preston

Humans in space suits make monkeys nervous.

— Richard Preston

“Ebola Zaire attacks every organ and tissue in the human body except skeletal muscle and bone. It is a perfect parasite because…

— Richard Preston

“Jahrling sat down at his desk and sighed. There was a landfill of papers on his desk, mostly about smallpox, and it…

— Richard Preston

“we could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart”

— Richard Preston

“C.J. had spoken longingly of finding the African termite queen, the glistening white sac that was half a foot long and as…

— Richard Preston

During climbs into taller trees, I was occasionally able to look down on the backs of birds, which shine with reflected sunlight…

— Richard Preston

The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence…

— Richard Preston

“Your mouth bleeds, and you bleed around your teeth, and you may have hemorrhages from the salivary glands—literally every opening in the…

— Richard Preston

“One room in the hospital had not been cleaned up. No one, not even the nuns, had had the courage to enter…

— Richard Preston

It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.

— Richard Preston

“The kill rate in humans infected with Ebola Zaire is nine out of ten. Ninety percent of the people who come down…

— Richard Preston

“In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you…

— Richard Preston

What can the redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory…

— Richard Preston

“In a sense, the Earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human…

— Richard Preston

“They were two human primates carrying another primate. One was the master of the earth, or at least believed himself to be,…

— Richard Preston

“Isn't it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear…

— Richard Preston

In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you…

— Richard Preston

When people asked him why he didn't work with those viruses, he replied, I don't particularly feel like dying.

— Richard Preston

“He saw virus particles shaped like snakes, in negative images. They were white cobras tangled among themselves, like the hair of Medusa.…

— Richard Preston

“farms on the lower slopes of the mountain. As the eye moved from”

— Richard Preston